California has long been
lurching irresponsibly toward fiscal unsustainability. The election results
indicate full speed ahead until the day of reckoning.

Business has served as
beast of burden in this journey, loaded down with onerous environmental and
employment regulations. A 2003 article in the magazine "Ideas on Liberty" noted
California's accelerating exodus of businesses even then. One departing
manufacturer stated, "We just came to the point where it seemed riskier to stay
in California than to leave." His destination was Idaho.

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The natural alternative
locations are nearby. The primary beneficiaries of the flight from California
are Nevada, Arizona and Utah. One of the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan
areas is St. George in business-friendly Utah's far southwestern corner. Fifty
years ago its population was about 5,000, and 30 years ago about 11,000. The
latest figure is above 75,000 for the city itself with about as many people
within commuting distance to the abundance of jobs there.

But the common
disadvantage of all these attractive states is that they are deserts. Their populations
depend mostly on river lifelines of water fed by remote precipitation in
upstream highlands. The supply is always tenuous.

So California
manufacturers, if you're wary of moving to areas where you may face water shortages,
consider Michigan. We have plenty of water.

It's true that
environmentalist campaigns about purported scarcities have zeroed in on water
and even try to guilt-trip us for letting our faucets run while we brush our
teeth. But their fictions aside, Michigan has a superabundance of water into
the quadrillions of gallons.

One weapon in the
scarcity assault is the misleading concept of "consumptive use." To consume
something is to use it up or destroy it. Fire consumes an object. A human
consumes a meal and leaves an empty plate.

If we recall our
grade-school science, however, we remember that water does not get consumed. It
is part of the hydrologic cycle by which it is continually converted from one
form to another, mostly from liquid to vapor and back to liquid again. It may
vanish from sight through evaporation, but it exists nonetheless. It is not
destroyed.

But "consumptive use"
connoting "loss" plunges ahead in the hydrologic vocabulary nonetheless. It is
potent artillery in the propaganda wars. The Great Lakes are said to be in
peril because a population of 20 or 40 million or whatever "uses" its water at
a daily per-capita rate of 50 or 100 gallons, so billions upon billions of
gallons over time are claimed to be consumed - that is, "lost."

Not true. Life forms are not consumers
of water but processors. Plants take up water and transpire it or evaporate it
into vapor to yield atmospheric fuel for the next round of precipitation. Animals
also take in water and release it.

So do we. Humans consist
mostly of water and continually renew their supplies, bringing water in as
liquid, giving off some as vapor and (we'll skip the details) discharging much of
it as liquid. This volume ends up, at least among city folk, in the
sewage-treatment plant, where some of it may evaporate and the rest goes into
streams where evaporation also occurs. We ourselves contribute to future
precipitation. We are not "users" of water but recyclers.

The key issue is not
extraction but replenishment. In this regard "consumptive use" has some relevance.
In desert areas the atmospheric dynamics prevent conversion of evaporation to precipitation
except in brief seasonal episodes. Water extraction in deserts mostly does
constitute "consumptive loss." Hoped-for rescue comes from remote replenishment
transported downstream for local availability.

In Michigan, by
contrast, replenishment is habitual. Our location in relation to sea water and
continent fosters replenishments amounting to as much as hundreds of billions
of gallons per event, sometimes even trillions. More good news: Weather records
indicate Michigan receives more precipitation than it did a century ago.

Presumably Michigan is
now politically structured to create an economic climate amiable to business. And
we have a water supply that is dazzling by desert standards.

Daniel Hager is
an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and
educational institute headquartered in Midland, Mich. Permission to reprint in
whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author and the Center are
properly cited.